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Good uses for old floppy disk drive?
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If it works, why not leave it?
Yes, it is useless under OS X, but is also doing no harm. I'm not sure what you'd use the space for. Without taking mine apart, I'm not sure if there's enough room for a hard drive in the bay. Even if there was, you'd need to use a SCSI drive as I'm pretty sure the main IDE bus only supports one hard drive.
If you ever get into playing with older Macs, however(particularly 68K Macs) it is very handy to have.
Apple has released most of their older OSs(I think most everything up to System 7.5) on their website, but most of the downloads are in the format of floppy disk images. You need a computer running a "classic" OS(OS 9 or earlier) and an internal floppy drive to make use of these.
When I'm making a set of system disks, I often dump a bunch of images onto a ZIP disk or CD, and use Disk Copy on my Beige G3 under OS 9 to make the floppies. In my experience, the G3 is the easiest, fastest, and overall the best computer for this job(especially since it's the last computer Apple made with an internal floppy).
If you're really determined to ditch it in your G3, stick it in a drawer. The drive is proprietary to Apple hardware, and-again-if you get into older PowerPC computers, you might find it handy.
Yes, it is useless under OS X, but is also doing no harm. I'm not sure what you'd use the space for. Without taking mine apart, I'm not sure if there's enough room for a hard drive in the bay. Even if there was, you'd need to use a SCSI drive as I'm pretty sure the main IDE bus only supports one hard drive.
If you ever get into playing with older Macs, however(particularly 68K Macs) it is very handy to have.
Apple has released most of their older OSs(I think most everything up to System 7.5) on their website, but most of the downloads are in the format of floppy disk images. You need a computer running a "classic" OS(OS 9 or earlier) and an internal floppy drive to make use of these.
When I'm making a set of system disks, I often dump a bunch of images onto a ZIP disk or CD, and use Disk Copy on my Beige G3 under OS 9 to make the floppies. In my experience, the G3 is the easiest, fastest, and overall the best computer for this job(especially since it's the last computer Apple made with an internal floppy).
If you're really determined to ditch it in your G3, stick it in a drawer. The drive is proprietary to Apple hardware, and-again-if you get into older PowerPC computers, you might find it handy.
Well also because floppy drives are so damn small they are only useful for transporting text, but that can be easily done over the network. I can use the bay for a USB fitting connected to a USB PCI card. Like this
http://www.ebay.com/itm/2-Port-USB-...rnal_Port_Expansion_Cards&hash=item5d46cb7429
I am not interested in going into ancient Macintosh stuff.
Answering my own thread
This is a good use for old floppy drives:
See them all
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=floppy+music
This is a good use for old floppy drives:
See them all
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=floppy+music
I always thought that was odd, Macs with floppy drives would not long utilize the disk drive in OS X yet you can get a USB floppy drive and hook it up and it works fine.
Just a healthy bit of Jobsian hatred for technologies older than 6 months no doubt
I'm sure the less people thought of any beige macs in 1997 the better as far as he was concerned...
Make an army of floppy robots and take over the world
A robot made of old Floppy drives? that's actually a cool thought and would be awesome to see!
Someone who has a bunch of computers with dead floppy drives would be really happy to get their hands on some working Apple floppy drives-especially since they're not exactly easy to find these days.